‘The Travellers’ Review: Bruce Beresford Returns with a Small-Scale Australian Drama
An opera set designer returns to Australia to face family tensions, cultural clashes, and a fading past in this sentimental dramedy from the director of ‘Tender Mercies’.
There’s a well-known—and, for many, controversial—comment by Quentin Tarantino in which he explains why he intends to stop making films at 60. His argument is that very few directors manage to sustain the quality of their work beyond that age. It’s clearly an overgeneralization—there are plenty of great films made by directors in their 60s, 70s, even 80s—but there’s also a degree of truth to it. At a certain point, many filmmakers seem to lose their edge, not necessarily in relation to changing trends but in connection with their own body of work, delivering films that feel progressively less inventive, less compelling, less alive.
Watching The Travellers, that idea kept coming back again and again. Bruce Beresford was never among the most celebrated Australian filmmakers, but he was once a very solid director, responsible for enduring titles like Breaker Morant, Tender Mercies, the widely popular Driving Miss Daisy, and several commercial hits throughout the 1980s and ’90s. Now 85, he continues to direct films for both cinema and television in his native Australia. But judging by this release, his latest work is far removed from his earlier achievements. In fact, it evokes precisely the phenomenon Tarantino described: a filmmaker who seems to have lost his rhythm, his sense of direction, and even his connection to the world around him.
Curiously titled—there’s little here that justifies the sense of movement implied by its name—The Travellers is a family dramedy that leans heavily on the most basic emotional beats in the book. It’s a sentimental, old-fashioned film that is only partially rescued—really, by just one of its three central performances—from slipping into what today would be called cringe. At times, the experience of watching it becomes an exercise in hoping it won’t sink any lower. Thankfully, it more or less stops right at that threshold.
The problems are evident from the opening shots, with flat cinematography and a televisual editing style. Luke Bracey plays Stephen, a successful Australian opera stage designer who has spent years living and working in Europe. When his mother—now barely recognizing him—approaches the end of her life (and is treated by the film as a surprisingly marginal figure), Stephen returns home to support his father, Fred. Played by Bryan Brown, a veteran of Australian cinema and a longtime Beresford collaborator, Fred is living alone and doesn’t seem entirely lucid either.
Stephen’s return to small-town life—somewhere in a sparsely populated area of Western Australia, a few hours from Perth—unfolds as a series of awkward encounters and minor collisions: with former lovers, old classmates, former bullies, his concerned sister (Susie Porter), and especially his eccentric father. Fred lives in a house that’s falling apart and behaves with a mix of stubbornness and oddity: he bathes fully clothed, eats in the most rudimentary way, and keeps the place in total disarray.
The film cycles through Stephen’s various conflicts: with his career (he’s due back in Europe soon for a production in Germany), with his family, with past relationships, and with the people he left behind. There’s also a layer of cultural friction. Beresford sketches Stephen as somewhere between refined and mildly snobbish—he drinks wine instead of beer, appreciates “the arts,” pronounces Giuseppe Verdi correctly, and orders chai lattes with almond milk—set against a local environment of beer pints, televised cricket, and coffee “with sugar and regular milk.” There are casually racist secondary characters and a few remarks from his father that strike Stephen as offensive. Everything is presented in the most schematic terms.
The Travellers ultimately fails to generate genuine emotion. It makes a blunt attempt at it in the final stretch—complete with an operatic sequence—but never quite gets there. The narrative includes a few oddly exaggerated turns, and the film even seems to position itself, judging by its ending, as a potential franchise starter, with an unusually open conclusion for such a traditional dramedy. Everything plays out in the most rudimentary, almost pedestrian way imaginable—something that’s hard to reconcile with a filmmaker who has multiple Oscar nominations (as both director and writer) and has competed four times in Berlin and three in Cannes.
If not for the occasional quirks in Bryan Brown’s performance, there would be little of value here. It’s not that Tarantino is necessarily right in his reasoning for stepping away from filmmaking—but watching The Travellers, it’s hard not to feel that his point carries some weight.
